The Salt Doll Went to Measure the Depths of the Sea Review

The Low Anthem – The Salt Doll Went To Measure The Depth Of The Sea

(Joyful Noise) United kingdom release date: 23 February 2018

At that place is a folk tale, or fable: a doll fabricated of salt reaches the seashore after making a long journey. She sees the expanse of h2o and wants to know what it is. The sea beckons her to stride into it; that way she will discover what the body of water is. The table salt doll steps into the sea and begins to deliquesce in the water. The ocean urges her to go deeper into information technology; that way she will find what the sea is. The salt doll goes further and eventually she is entirely dissolved. Thus she discovers that she and the ocean are one and the same, and as she learns what the ocean is she learns something primal about herself.

This tale serves as a starting indicate for The Depression Anthem'due south 5th anthology, a concept piece of work that riffs on the table salt doll story. Nosotros might therefore expect information technology to be an anthology about cocky-discovery, unity and spirituality, and in a style it is. It bears remembering that shortly after the release of their concluding album, Eyeland, the band were involved in a serious motorcar blow: in the aftermath of that sort of trauma, a story like that of the salt doll and the ocean can human action as a starting indicate for healing self-reflection.

And it sounds as though they take used it to rebuild themselves from the ground up. This is more than pared downwardly than virtually of their previous work; acoustic guitars, violin and piano rub up against only enough electronic sounds. The Depression Anthem still audio like a folk ring, but they are at present a more contemporary one. Some of the percussion parts were apparently tapped out on vinyl records: that does seem horribly pretentious but it turns out to be oddly effective, and it'southward such a simple and timeless idea that you wonder why folk music hasn't already embraced this particular form of turntablism.

In The Low Canticle'south retelling of the story, the common salt doll goes into the body of water in a diving bell. You can see it on the album's front end encompass and it's referenced in a couple of the tracks. Drowsy Dowsing Dolls fades out to those lovely pulsing sounds that call to mind submarines descending in onetime movies; and the closing rail, Final Transmission From the Diving Umbrella, which strongly recalls Grandaddy's songs of warped human-computer interaction, has the refrain "Release the diving bell".

But the salt doll is just one graphic symbol in an ensemble slice that draws on many maritime myths and histories. "Fill the fatty walls with arrows" is the call to artillery of The Krill Whistle Their Fight Song, a kind of inverted Moby Dick. And Gondwanaland seems to be narrated past fossils embossed on the seabed. Give My Body Dorsum might exist the near straightforward folk ballad, but its two-minute duration deals with history, mortality and the sheer immensity of the ocean; its "mountains college than any peak you've always seen up upon dry land". The salt doll might be falling through space and fourth dimension hither, just so are nosotros all.

The Salt Doll Went To Mensurate The Depth Of The Sea is something of a reinvention for The Depression Anthem. Evidently it has acted as an opportunity for them to regroup after the car accident – and later Eyeland, a muddled album that suggested a loss of direction. In contrast, this is the most consequent anthology to date by a ring whose flashes of luminescence hitherto seemed oft dissolved in their encumbering desire to set downwardly a surfeit of ideas on each tape. Here, their creative energies are reconciled only as the salt doll is reconciled with the sea.

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Source: https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/low-anthem-salt-doll-went-measure-depth-sea

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